If I ever mention anything about Fully Charged on Twitter I immediately get asked about Carpool.

If I ever mention my science fiction books on Twitter I immediately get asked about Red Dwarf.

I want to quickly point out that I’m not complaining, I’ve very proud and privileged to be involved in any and all of these projects

There is nothing I can currently say about Red Dwarf.

But seeing as I produce Carpool myself I can say what the hell I like.

This picture is a still from a recently recorded Carpool I did with the wonderful comedian and political ranter Mark Thomas.

It’s very funny.

You can’t see it yet.

Let me explain.

When I first started Carpool years ago it was an experiment and bizarrely for me it was an experiment that worked.

It was a costly and time consuming experiment but I loved doing it.

Eventually (after making 90 episodes on my own) it was commissioned by UKTV and I made a 20 guest series for Dave in the UK.

Finally I got paid something for doing the shows.

Then I did some other proper work and I didn’t have time to make any more, but the ones I’d made still got 1,000’s of views every day.

So why don’t I make more.

Two reasons and they are both to do with money.

The big one is insurance. My regular car insurance covers myself and my passengers but if there was an accident and the insurance company discovered I had camera equipment in the car, there would very likely be problems.

I don’t even want to think about it, 112 episodes recorded and no accidents but it’s a worry.

So I used a thing called ‘action car’ insurance which is what they use on film and TV productions. This covers you for specific time periods when you are recording and it’s on top of your regular car insurance.

It’s expensive but it means the likes of Stephen Fry and Sir Patrick Stewart are covered for literally tens of millions of pounds.

Second is administration. It really isn’t that hard to fir the cameras, pick someone up, drive them somewhere while chatting and drop them off. In fact it’s great fun.

It really isn’t that hard to edit the shows, it’s not hard to upload them, all that is a walk in the park.

Arranging what time to pick them up and from where and on what day is incredibly time consuming, complicated and takes the skills of someone who can organise things really efficiently.

I am not that person.

Every Carpool episode I did took about 15 e-mails, 3 phone calls and a couple of days of stressing about with diaries.

I cannot face that again.

I need someone full time for a limited period to do that part for me so all I need to know is;

‘You’re picking up Rupert Hound on Friday at 10:30am from the BBC Wood Lane and taking him to the ‘le Club Erotique des Gentlemen’ in D’Arblay Street, Soho.’

Sweet. I could do that.

But I would have to pay that person. I don’t have a budget. No really, I don’t have a brass farthing to spare.

So, I’ve toyed with Kickstarter campaigns and tip jugs and bitcoin bins, it’s all a bit shonky and anyway, the joy of Carpool was everyone who had a computer could watch it for free.

That’s what new media is all about, it’s all about free.

The only problem with that brave new media paradigm is pillocks like me working really hard, making shows that are popular and not only not earning anything but actually forking out for cameras, petrol, time, editing, phone bills, electricity bills, the list is dull and long.

In April 2009 I posted the first episode of Carpool on YouTube. Earlier that year I had posted a few episodes on iTunes which is where the majority of the downloads/views took place. Since then I've made over 100 episodes with a total combined download count of 7.6 million.Hopefully I will make some more later this year.A few weeks ago my tweet stream turned into a torrent as people asked me if I'd seen news of Jerry Seinfeld's new series 'Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.' I checked it out and while the stuff in the car is clearly exactly the same idea, shot in an almost identical way, it's hard to suggest it's a rip-off. For a start half the show takes place in a coffee bar or cafe, shot with a professional crew, it's clearly got a big budget and features very well known faces from the world of comedy. Assuming it's a rip-off would mean that Mr Seinfeld or his associates had seen Carpool and thought, 'Hey! We could do that!'

It's just that Jerry has a lot of cars, he likes driving, he's a comedian, new cameras allow you to shoot in a car, he knows lots of comedians, he's making a show. 'Hey, that's a great idea Jerry!'It's fine, what am I going to do about it? What can I do about it? Nothing except make some new episodes of carpool and get a lot more hits because of what Jerry is doing. This has already happened, Carpool's existing episodes have all had a remarkable upward swing in views and downloads over the last couple of weeks, there hasn't been a new one posted for 18 months

I think the video explains it all, but just in case I will try and cover all the areas I may have forgotten.

Carpool will be back, probably late September but don't hold me to that.

The new series will still be available on the same feeds on iTunes and YouTube, but it will hopefully look a little bit better, it won't have any sound synch problems on YouTube, and there will be audio only versions available.

I'm always happy to receive suggestions of who you'd like to see on the show.

I've got some cracking passengers already lined up and a lot more in the pipeline.

It’s not surprising there is some confusion about Carpool, where it is, when it’s on, if it’s on, what it’s on, even why it’s on.

This is partly due to the way it came about, and partly because of the complex relationship between traditional broadcasting (what I called proper telly) and internet distribution. We are all using nascent technologies which are evolving and changing all the time, keeping track of one podcast is not that easy.

Unless you use iTunes of course then it’s very easy, but there are clearly a lot of people who don’t like using it and that’s fair enough.

Back in January 2009 I started putting them out exclusively on iTunes because I use that system, I understood it and the thinking was it was a premier media distribution tool.

More importantly, there was no time restriction, the podcast could be as long as you wanted.

Unlike YouTube which at the time had a 10 minute limit. If you had a directors account (which I now do) no such restrictions applied and I wanted carpool to be longer than 10 minutes.

So iTunes it was and it worked. After 18 months the series had been downloaded close to 3 million times. I had managed to post a weekly episode for 18 months entirely on my own, believe me, that took some work. I loved it but it was exhausting keeping the flow going.

In early 2010 I got a directors account on YouTube and started putting them up there too. I now wish I had been able to do that from the start as I now put big hefty HD versions of the show on YouTube and more people are slowly finding it and using that.

Then in the summer of 2010 we started to record the TV versions for Dave, I knew I couldn’t keep up the regular weekly releases so I had to let it stop.

The most important lesson I have learned about online media is making sure you have a new show every week. It makes a huge difference. The word spreads quickly, people subscribe to the feed either through iTunes or an RSS feed and the numbers of downloads each week constantly increases.

Now my plan is to mix and match, some full length episodes from the Dave series, some newly recorded episodes, or ‘old school’ carpool.

This is something I've been meaning to do for ages. Here are the simple facts.

Last year UKTV (better known as Dave) commissioned 10 new episodes of the carpool podcast I've been running for the past 2 years on www.llewtube.com.

Each new 30 minute episode features two people, but we recorded much more than the 10 to 12 minutes we could use for the broadcast version.

The full length versions will all be released on www.llewtube.com and iTunes and non iTunes RSS feeds and YouTube.com/carpooluk starting on Friday 7th Jan 2011. If you subscribe to either iTunes or the RSS feed you will get them automatically.

They will all be free and available anywhere on the surface of the planet which has an internet connection

It might have been something to do with a combination of technology, the internet and having a few mates who’d been on the telly.

Or maybe it was interviewing people on Scrapheap Challenge over a ten year period and realizing that I could do it, that I found people interesting and wanted to find out more about them.

Or was it the time David Baddiel gave me a lift through Notting Hill in his steamy little Ford Ka about ten years ago and I put a small video camera in the corner of the windscreen. It was held in place by a squashed Red Dwarf T shirt. Why did I do that, because Mr Baddiel and I wanted to re-create scenes from Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Why did we want to do that? I have absolutely no idea. The most important part of this experience was that we both forgot the camera was on and we just kept talking. That tape is highly obscene, libelous, disgusting and hideously revealing of our peccadilloes. It will never be released. Some of it is bloody funny though. Sorry, I shouldn’t tease.

Or it could be that for the first time in 25 years of working on proper telly, I actually had time to try something else. I suspect it was a combination of all of these factors.

All I wish is that I could honestly claim that I had the foresight to know that if you got someone in a car, with a couple of little cameras suckered to the windscreen and you give them a lift, they are far more relaxed about talking than if they are in a TV studio, with a crew and lights and big cameras. I didn’t have that foresight, it was pure flook.

If I had tried to do Carpool 10 years ago, for a start I would have to have some giant camera rig strapped to the outside of the car, we would have to stop every 20 minutes to change the tapes and if it rained we’d have to stop.

That’s just recording, the equally important fact is that I would also not have been able to edit or distribute it myself. I would have had to put on my battered suit and troll up to the swish offices of one of Britain’s leading Broadcasters and ‘pitch the idea’ which would have been a painful and depressing exercise in futility.

Picture the scene, I’m sitting at the table with a scrotty bit of A4 with ‘Carpool’ written on it, but not much else. My suit looks rubbish, and I’ve now realized it was a mistake to wear it as the guy I’ve come to see is 15 years younger than me and wearing jeans and a T shirt.

He’s excited though, he told me his mum used to let him stay up and watch Red Dwarf, so I’m in with a chance.

“We love it Bob, it’s brave, innovative, cutting edge, it’s pushing the envelope, it breaks new ground, it’s really not what we’re looking for right now.’

It would never have happened, the idea is a non idea. Give someone a lift and record the conversation, how banal is that. How would you pitch it?

‘Do they win anything?’

‘No.’

‘Is there jeopardy, you could have an ejector seat like James Bond had, if they’re not funny in the first 2 minutes, you eject them.’

‘No.’

‘What about if you got singers, you could play Karaoke CD’s on the car stereo and they could sing, and you could have votes and…’

‘No.’

‘You could have models and footballers, it could be a massive celeb fest if you did it in the back of a Rolls Royce and you pretended to be a member of the Royal Family.’

‘No, it’s just me, in a hybrid car, giving someone interesting a lift.’

‘There’s no way you could cook something while you drive along is there, or bake cakes?’

So that’s why I didn’t bother. As you may be able to tell from the voracity of that interchange, you can feel it can’t you. I’ve been there. Many many times. So the freedom that the new technology gave me was intoxicating.

The tools we have within our grasp now are breathtaking from the perspective of just a few years ago.

When I wrote and produced my first sit-com for Channel 4 in 1986, I worked in an edit suit that cost over £140,000. It was a mass of boxes, wires and screens that filled a small room.

Now you can edit much better, faster and with more precision on a laptop with software that is either free or a fraction of the cost.

The cameras we shot that sit-com on cost about £60,000 each, they were massive and the picture quality by today’s standards is sub phone.

And even if I could have done that, I couldn’t have distributed it.

So it was all those factors that made it possible.

I shot the early episodes of Carpool using little second hand cameras, we’d used similar ones on Scrapheap, they were a bit wobbly but they just about did the job.

It started very slowly; just a few 1,000 people watched each week. But each week a few 1,000 more joined them. There was no PR machine pushing the show, there was no publicity at all, except me banging away on Twitter and word of mouth.

Then I got 3 new high definition cameras and the quality of both sound and picture increased. So did the number of people watching. I still wasn’t earning any money from it, but I had jobs in TV that kept me going, I had support from RDF media, that’s the people who made Scrapheap, and I had support from Toyota cars.

Total download figures through iTunes and various RSS feeds is now close to 4 million, not each episode, for the whole lot, close to 80 episodes.

Carpool is now on Dave, and in January 2011, the new shows, re-cut to 30 minutes, will be on the regular carpool feed, on iTunes, llewtube, YouTube, all that. I’m also shooting new episodes of ‘old school carpool, although there’s been a gap in transmission, carpool will be back with a bang next year.